Gerritsen Beach is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, located between Sheepshead Bay to the west and Marine Park to the east. The area is served by Brooklyn Community Board 15. The population of the neighborhood is 8,353 as of the 2010 U.S. census.
The neighborhood is named for Wolphert Gerretse, a Dutch settler, who, in the early seventeenth century, built a house and mill on Gerritsen Creek, which is now part of the nearby Marine Park neighborhood. The three-hundred-year-old mill was destroyed by fire in 1931. The famous Whitney family owned property by the mill and built a mansion. The Mansion had horse stables, servant quarters, a carriage house, and a private race track. The Mansion was knocked down in 1936 for the Marine Park Building Developments but the carriage house was still left standing. The Carriage house was converted into a private home that is still standing today.
Until the early twentieth century, the area remained undeveloped except for a few squatters’ bungalows clustered at the foot of Gerritsen Avenue. In 1920, Realty Associates, a speculative real-estate builder, began constructing a middle-class summer resort there. The southwestern section of Gerritsen’s meadow was soon covered to one-story bungalows with peaked roofs and no backyards. The popularity of this venture spurred further growth. Some bungalow-owners made them suitable for year-round habitation; others built two-story houses with backyards; and, within a decade, there were fifteen hundred houses in Gerritsen Beach.